Tips & tricks to get kids to eat vegatables

I have a 2 year old, and so far she loves most veggies. The one I had the biggest trouble with was broccoli. I found a great solution and now she even requests broccoli for dinner! She loves Mac & Cheese, so I cut cooked broccoli up very small and add it with extra cheese. Broccoli & cheese mac! She loves it.

That's a great idea... unfortunately if you have a kid like one of my brothers was even that wouldn't be enough.

Some kids actually are genetically predisposed to finding the taste of green vegetable appalling. I think the most important thing for a kid especially one prone to being picky is to do a number of things:
- Be creative (as you have successfully done)
- Make sure they are eating a balanced diet. (if they don't eat the broccoli it's not the end of the world if they are eating other vegetables)
- Encourage your children to try new things
- Encourage them to re-try a food after a while... taste buds do change and let them know that tasted buds do change.
- Don't ever force them to eat a food they clearly do not like
- You can sneak lots of veggies into foods by pureeing them and mixing them into foods you know they like (this works especially great for soups and pastas)

I am a pre-kindergarten teacher. I always encourage the kids I work with to at least try a little mousy bite of everything on their plate before turning up their noses. I tell them how your tastes change and let them know that the worst thing that can happen when trying a food is that there mouth tastes icky for a moment or I joke with them and I ask them if they think they'll die if they try a bite - giggling usually ensues for a while then more often than not the kid will actually take a bite. :) Anyways great thread... I'm going tohave to check back to see what everyone else is saying...

Thankfully, I am extremely lucky where she is concerned. Kelsey eats lots of veggies. Her favorite is onions. Sometimes I will catch her eating one like an apple straight from the pantry! I just take it, peel it and let her go. (and brush her teeth twice when she's done. Peeeyuuuu!!) She loves salad and green leafy veggies, so she's good diet wise. We've always fed her the same things we eat. It was cute seeing a 1 yr old chowing down on sauerkraut & sausage. She even eats brussel sprouts.

It's funny, we were at a birthday party for my niece and my cousin's bf decided to chime in when I let Kelsey eat a piece of cake. He told me I shouldn't let her eat cake, because she was going to get fat. I told him my daughter ate more veggies in a day than he did in a week and that he better back off.

There are children in my class who are sent to school and their entire lunch box is full of junk food.... It makes me glad that the school provides the snacks that way I can at least make sure they eat something healthy in the day. I wished I could take those parents aside at the end of the day and give them a speech on healthy eating but that would be overstepping my bounds.

She's a crazy kid. If I'm chopping onions while I'm cooking, I have to watch out for her little hands trying to steal some off the cutting board. She gets it from me. When I was little, I would eat onion & miracle whip sandwiches w/ my grandpa.